A Bunch Of Articles I Wrote For Kotaku

A couple years ago, I decided it would be cool to put all my Kotaku articles into a single post and update it regularly. If you want to look through a list of highlights from the last few years, you can find them here.

This list now starts with my final goodbye post from December 2018 and goes back through August 2016. Obviously, I’m no longer updating it. I’ve included dates with each article, though a couple of those might be “republish” dates, and not the date of original publication. (Those dates are always noted in the articles themselves.) In a couple of instances, I’ve inserted older articles I like into the chronological flow.

These articles are just the big stuff: Features, reviews, and the like. You can find a full list of things I published here.

I guess everyone eventually writes one of these posts, and today it’s my turn. At the end of December, I’m leaving Kotaku. I’ll continue co-hosting the Splitscreen podcast, but that’s gonna be it. (12/19/2018)

Usually when I play a single-player game, I go through it from start to finish. I play each new level after the last one, until I stop playing or get to the end. That’s not how I played 2016’s excellent episodic Hitman, however, and it’s not how I’m playing its fantastic new sequel. (11/16/2018)

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Red Dead Redemption 2 are both big open-world games, and they both came out in October of 2018. Both involve a hero on a horse riding around and murdering lots of people. The similarities end there. (10/30/2018)

From tip to tail, Red Dead Redemption 2 is a profound, glorious downer. It is the rare blockbuster video game that seeks to move players not through empowering gameplay and jubilant heroics, but by relentlessly forcing them to confront decay and despair. It has no heroes, only flawed men and women fighting viciously to survive in a world that seems destined to destroy them. (10/25/2018)

Of the many differences between last year’s Assassin’s Creed Origins and this year’s Odyssey, the changes to upgradable abilities have the most dramatic effect on gameplay. Origins’ skill trees were a convoluted mess even at the time, and Odyssey’s refinements bring that messiness into sharper relief. (/8/16/2018)

We live in an age of sequels, but not all sequels are created equal. Are you playing a true sequel, or are you peeking a prequel? A reboot, expandalone, or maybe a threequel? Don’t get piqued, people. Our sequel technique will sort everything out. (9/27/2018)

Destiny 2’s new expansion, Forsaken, turns the game into something that people can play as much as they want without running out of things to do. If anything, its tantalizing new pursuits, designed to satisfy the appetites of the series’ most voracious players, may be too life-consuming. (9/21/2018)

In the PS4’s very good new Spider-Man game, Peter Parker spends a lot of time web-swinging through Manhattan in pursuit of truth, justice, and collectables. As he flings himself about, he frequently gets calls from friends on his radio, and he responds differently depending on whether or not he’s exerting himself. (9/10/2018)

Last night, with the help of the Internet, I found and completed a harrowing challenge in Destiny 2’s new Forsaken expansion. I wasn’t supposed to be powerful enough to do it, but after some creative trial and error, I found a way. (9/06/2018)

I’ve been voraciously replaying Monster Hunter: World on PC over the last few weeks, and have been having a hell of a good time. That’s partly because it’s just a good game, but also because I’m so, so much better at it than I was on my first time through. (8/14/2018)

In addition to all those deadly beasts, Monster Hunter: Worldhas loads of colorful non-monster characters. You’ll find them walking in the wild or chilling out at HQ, usually minding their business and occasionally giving you a sidequest. (8/10/2018)

More than a dozen hours into Hollow Knight, the 2D Metroidvania played a joke on me. It was a really good joke, and also kind of a mean one. Then again, most good video game jokes are a little mean. (8/08/2018)

Everyone chases some kind of low-key but elusive white whale, a casual desire or goal that remains forever out of reach. For some, it’s finding the best possible cup of coffee, or the perfect pair of jeans. For me, it’s getting my PC CPU to run below 70 degrees Celsius while under load. (8/06/2018)

In my first game of Dead Cells, I died after about four minutes. In my most recent one, I lasted almost an hour. The time difference between those two attempts says a lot about how Dead Cells evolves as you play it, and how you evolve alongside it. (8/06/2018)

For two years, No Man’s Sky has been one of gaming’s great Rorschach tests. View it one way, and it’s a beautiful adventure through an endlessly fascinating parallel universe. Tilt your head, and it’s a janky hunk of junk built on a bed of LIES. (8/01/2018)

In Hollow Knight, looks can be deceiving. A sad little lamplit town may hide the entrance to a beautiful buried kingdom. A towering knight might turn out to be a sad, small thing in outsized armor. An onrushing green beast may actually be a wee creature disguised by a pile of leaves. And a simple-looking 2D action game can slowly unfurl into one of gaming’s great adventures. (7/05/2018)

You know how you tell yourself you’re gonna finally try some new restaurants, then a week later you’re back at the same pizza place you always go to? I’ve been doing that same thing, except with Bloodborne. (6/07/2018)

This week, Destiny 2 got its second major expansion since it came out last September. It’s called Warmind, and in many respects, it’s a disappointment. However, it benefits from the many small changes Bungie is making to the game more broadly, and succeeds in setting up a long, demanding grind that could keep some players busy until the fall. (5/09/2018)

Last night, Nintendo announced that the Switch will be getting cloud-save backups in September. That means you have four months to drop your Switch into a lake, or let your dog chew it up, or accidentally back over it with your car. (5/08/2018)

I really like interacting with the Nintendo Labo. I like popping, snapping, folding, and even just looking at each little piece. It’s gotten to the point that I’m having a hard time throwing any of it away. (4/30/2018)

Austin Wintory (Journey, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate) about what it was like auditioning to be the composer for Star Trek: Discovery, and why he’s glad he did it even though he didn’t get the gig. (4/22/2018)

Whenever Destiny or its sequel crashes or has a connection failure, you get a distinct error code. Usually those codes correspond to an animal, fruit, or musical instrument. Some are better than others. (4/20/2018)

I play action games, RPGs, puzzle games, adventure games, and games from pretty much every other genre. But the older I get, the less I find myself thinking in terms of those genres. Instead, I categorize games by how they fit into my life. (4/04/2018)

As fun as Far Cry 5can be, it’s definitely got its share of bugs. There are looping lines of dialogue, inconsistent enemy behavior, physics glitches, and a few bugs that straight-up break the game. I ran into a funny one of those a few nights ago. (4/02/2018)

Sometimes I imagine my brain is a collection of baskets that contain everything I know. There’s a basket for the English language, and a basket for music stuff. There’s one for Lord of the Rings lore, and another for Bloodborne monsters. Right alongside those is a worn but sizable basket that contains all my accumulated knowledge of guns. (3/29/2018)

It’s Friday night, and you’re browsing Netflix. You want to relax and watch something. What should be a chill time flipping through shows and movies is significantly less chill because these STUPID ADS KEEP PLAYING. (3/26/2018)

Destiny 2 launched exactly six months ago today, though at times it feels more like six years. A bunch has changed since September, and the game has gone through some dramatic highs and lows. (Mostly lows.) (3/06/2018)

The afternoon sun cascaded over the Flotsam town square as Geralt of Rivia blinked off his hangover. He grunted, stretched his Witcher legs, and cracked his Witcher back. He slowly scratched an itch on his Witcher chin and took in the scene before him. (8/5/2011)

My PC can do a lot of things. It can play video games at high resolutions and snappy frame rates. It can run the latest virtual reality software, transporting me to fantastical virtual worlds. It cannot, however, reliably sleep through the night. (2/22/2018)

For years, the Wii U exclusive Bayonetta 2 has been like that amazing restaurant that’s tucked away in a depressing mall on the far side of town. It’s fantastic, sure, but it’d be so much better if it were easier to reach.

At a first glance, it may seem like Destiny 2 and Monster Hunter: World don’t have much common. But there are several clear reasons why people like me are switching from Bungie’s first-person shooter to Capcom’s third-person monster-fighter. The biggest one, in my view, comes down to grinding and loot. (2/07/2018)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: In September, Bungie releases an online first-person shooter. A few months and a disappointing expansion later, the game is in trouble. Fans are mad; lots of people are quitting. Bungie vows to do better and sets about making improvements. Patient fans are eventually rewarded with a better game. (1/12/2018)

When it gets dark in a video game, it’s usually not all that dark. The cave you’re in may be dim. The forest at night might be shadowy. But video games almost never go pitch black. Assassin’s Creed Origins is a welcome exception. (1/10/2018)

Last week I began playing Warframe, a video game about robot gymnasts who spend all their money on clothes. I blew up a few bad guys, then took one look at my extremely intimidating inventory screen and decided I needed help. (1/09/2018)

Back when it came out, Star Wars: The Force Awakens played like a straightforward homage to 1977’s Star Wars. It was plenty fun, but wasn’t all that deep. Now that I’ve seen its follow-up, The Last Jedi, The Force Awakens seems a lot more interesting. (1/03/2018)

For all the video game industry’s noisy hype about groundbreaking technology, it’s still rare that a device comes along and actually breaks new ground. In just nine months, the Nintendo Switch has done just that. The world of games feels different now than it did one year ago. (12/13/2017)

Video games will always manipulate us. Each challenge and scenario in a game has been carefully engineered to make us react a certain way. Most of the time, that’s what we sign up for. But the moment real money enters the equation, something changes. (11/29/2017)

The first half of 2017 was crammed with exceptional games. That high tide ebbed in May, and I’ve spent the last couple of weeks going back and catching up on what I missed. I’ve also spent a lot of time playing Minecraft, a game that came out almost six years ago. (11/16/2017)

When I heard that the 2011 detective game L.A. Noire was getting remastered for current consoles, my first thought was, “Oh, cool! That was an interesting game.” Then I remembered that L.A. Noire was a very weird game, and one I didn’t even like back when I first played it. (11/14/2017)

For the last 15 years or so, we have witnessed the rise of a great evil: the video game mini-map. Recent events have given me hope that the dark era of the mini-map may finally be coming to an end. (10/31/2017)

For all its extraordinary visual splendor, Assassin’s Creed Origins is ultimately an ordinary video game. That’s not such a bad thing, particularly if you like looking at pretty vistas and watching numbers go up. (10/26/2017)

Video games are very good at teaching, even if they have to repeat the lesson over and over. Sometimes the lesson is “don’t fall into that bottomless pit.” Other times it’s “she’s just not that into you.” (10/06/2017)

I’m playing a lot less Destiny 2 than I was a week ago. I sense I’m not alone in that. That’s because despite—and occasionally because of—all the ways Destiny 2 has improved upon its predecessor, the game is struggling to balance between people who wish they could play it forever and those who worry they can’t keep up. (9/29/2017)

As I struggle to fall asleep after a night of Destiny 2, the game keeps running through my mind. It’s like getting a song stuck in my head: I see the flash of combat and feel the rumbling controller in my hand. But I rarely hear the sounds of battle. Instead, I hear voices. (9/19/2017)

Have you ever looked directly at the Sun only to find it wasn’t there? That’s the question asked by The 2017 Solar Eclipse, the ultimate can’t-miss entertainment experience of the year. Unless you missed it. (8/22/2017)

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy is an easy video game to like in spite of its flaws. It’s buoyed by a winning cast of characters and has some of the prettiest vistas this side of an actual trip to India. It also includes one of the most entertaining hidden features I’ve ever encountered in a video game. (8/22/2017)

No Man’s Sky keeps changing, almost entirely for the better. With each update, I’ve worried Hello Games is finally going to take out my favorite move in the game. So far they haven’t. I’m starting to worry less. (8/18/2017)

Today Thomas Was Alone and Volume designer Mike Bithell dropped a surprise game on Steam called Subsurface Circular. It’s a short robot detective story set entirely on a train beneath a futuristic city, and it’s pretty cool. (8/17/2017)

Nintendo’s brilliant online shooter Splatoon 2 deserves to be copied by other similar games. Not necessarily the fashion stuff or the whole “paint the floor” thing. Rather, some of the game’s smaller ideas…. (8/17/2017)

Every year it seems our planet spins closer to catastrophe. Superstorms ravage our coastlines, and clean water becomes scarcer. The rich build walls to keep out the poor, while the poor grow ever more desperate. And please don’t talk to me about nuclear war. (8/11/2017)

Hello, fellow Splatoon fans. I’m writing to you today, just a bit ahead of Splatfest, to remind you that you definitely do not need to use motion controls when you play. Especially if you’re on the other team from me. (8/01/2017)

The screenshot above shows the results of a Splatoon 2match I played over the weekend. You’ll notice my team won by a tenth of a percent. If you look closely, you’ll also notice how the other team could’ve stopped us. (7/24/2017)

It’s the summer of 2017. The flood of spring games has abated, and fall is still a ways away. The days are long, the nights are warm, and it’s a good time to replay Wolfenstein: The New Order. (6/19/2017)

Merriam-Webster defines exclusive as “limiting or limited to possession, control, or use by a single individual or group.” If you follow video games, your understanding of the word is probably more refined. (6/12/2017)

The first half of 2017 was crammed with exceptional games. That high tide ebbed in May, and I’ve spent the last couple of weeks going back and catching up on what I missed. I’ve also spent a lot of time playing Minecraft, a game that came out almost six years ago. (5/26/2017)

The new PS4/PC game What Remains of Edith Finch tells the tale of a doomed family living in a mansion off the coast of Washington state. It’s a cool story, but what does it all mean? Let’s discuss. (5/10/2017)

On the surface, Zelda: Breath of the Wild doesn’t have much in common with the new sci-fi thriller Prey. While the games are different in a lot of ways, both are well-made simulations that reward experimentation and exploration. And both give you fun ways to climb around. (5/09/2017)

You can go several hours in Grand Theft Auto IV before you get a gun. Soon after that, you’re blasting your way through shootouts with SWAT teams. But for those first few hours, you’re just some guy in Brooklyn, trying to make a new life. (4/28/2017)

You’re at a social gathering and the people you’re with start talking about games. Games you’ve never played. You listen along and laugh and nod, but you start to wonder if maybe you should say something. (4/27/2017)

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild does not dole out rewards predictably. Often you’ll spend an afternoon figuring out some elaborate puzzle, only to walk away with some rupees or a weapon you didn’t need. Other times the reward will be just as “useless,” but more special than any pile of loot could be. (4/24/2017)

I’m betting that a lot of people who played Far Cry 2 didn’t finish it. It’s a chaotic, grueling game, and it’s at least five hours too long. If you made it to the end, you got a finale just as flawed, ambitious, and bleak as the game preceding it. (4/20/2017)

JRPG victory music is one of the best types of video game music. Every time you emerge from battle victorious, a familiar, stirring theme plays. I want that music to play in my everyday life. (4/12/2017)

Rock Band was great, but Rock Band was also awkward and cumbersome. Now here comes Rock Band VR, a few years after most of us got rid of our last plastic instrument. It’s also cumbersome, and it’s also great. In fact, it’s the most fun I’ve had with Rock Band in years. (4/17/2017)

Persona 5 is a really good game. It’s also complicated and occasionally unforgiving, with a ton of rules to learn and systems to memorize. If you want to live your best possible year in Tokyo, you may want a little guidance.

Over the last three years, I’ve played more than 1,000 hours of Destiny. Over the last five months, I’ve barely played any. This week I returned to the game, and let me tell you, it is no small feat to climb back into a game you used to play obsessively. (3/31/2017)

Building and maintaining your own gaming PC is the best. It’s also occasionally the worst. This week I upgraded my PC, fully expecting it to be a pain in the ass. Instead, something magical happened. Windows 10 actually came through. (3/30/2017)

Imagine your old high school. Picture the doors you’d pass through at the start of each day. See if you can recall the awkward conversations you had with your friends, or the smell of the cafeteria at lunchtime. Now throw all that in the garbage and replace it with something impossibly cooler, impossibly more stylish, impossibly better. That’s Persona 5. (3/29/2017)

After dozens of wonderful hours playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, I finally came across a bad mission. It’s bad enough to serve as a point of reference for just how good the rest of the game is. It sticks out like a sore thumb on an otherwise beautifully manicured hand. (3/22/2017)

Hey, there’s a new Mass Effect game out this week! How about that. While Mass Effect: Andromeda tells a story independent of the original trilogy, there’s enough existing lore, jargon and backstory that you probably want to brush up before you dive in. I’m here to help. (3/21/2017)

So you’ve been playing Breath of the Wild for more than a week. You’ve made some decent progress. You’ve finished some of the story and unlocked most of the map. It’s only natural that you’d start fast traveling. (3/15/2017)

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild manages to be both massive and unusually detailed. The sprawl of Hyrule will take weeks or even months for most of us to explore, not just because of its square mileage but because of how much there is to see and do in a given field or forest.(3/10/2017)

Unlike its predecessors, the new Nintendo Switch has a boring operating system. Not only does it lack Nintendo’s characteristic oddball playfulness, it’s also nearly silent. There’s no music. It’s a shame. (3/08/2017)

The new PS4 game Horizon Zero Dawn does a lot of big stuff well. Literal big stuff, like robots the size of buildings. It also nails a lot of small things. Amazing leg animations, sure, but also things that more directly affect how it feels to play the game. (3/07/2017)

The Nintendo Switch is a fascinating new game console built around a novel and well-executed central idea. It also has plenty of problems that will doubtless be improved upon in a future version. Nintendo is yet again trying something new, and here we are to take the plunge alongside them. (3/01/2017)

Video games are a lot of fun, but they can also be frustrating. From time to time, you may even get frustrated enough that you want to throw something. Good news! Your controller is right there in your hand.(2/24/2017)

Your ability to enjoy the tabletop game Secret Hitler will likely depend on your ability to laugh as an increasingly impotent progressive coalition fails to halt the rise of fascism. No but seriously, it’s a fun party game. (2/22/2017)

I like plenty of things about Final Fantasy XV, but the map and menus are not among them. This game’s interface is a mess of nonsense so carelessly taped together that it defies logic or comprehension.

Batman: Arkham Knight spins one of the most ambitious video game stories ever told, and watching it thunder to its conclusion is like watching a 747 successfully land on a helicopter pad. It may not be known for its narrative, but that is its achievement—a spiraling and notably interactive tale that takes you inside the mind of one of popular culture’s most enduring and fascinating figures.

So you just started playing chapter 13 of Final Fantasy XV. It sucks. You feel trapped in a nightmare that will never end. Take some small comfort in knowing that you are not the only one to suffer through it.

In Nintendo’s recently released mobile game Super Mario Run, the famous plumber leaps his way through a couple dozen levels on his way to rescue Princess Peach from Bowser. Been there, done that. Yet perhaps there is a second, darker reading of this game? Maybe there’s an interpretation that shakes the accepted Mario lore to its very core??

Despite its infuriating control issues, awful stealth missions, interminable boss fights and half-baked sidequests, I cannot discount Gravity Rush 2’s mammoth ambition and abundance of otherworldly charm. If a game must be a mess, at least let it be this exuberant a mess.

2016 was a great year for video games, and an even better year for video game music. It was also a diverse year, with a mix of Norse folk music, spy movie histrionics, ambient soundscapes and extremely heavy metal.

In truth, 2016 was not “The Year of VR.” It was the year of the start of VR. Multiple major tech companies released impressive VR systems that were clearly the first of their kind; flawed and fascinating, destined to be improved upon and replaced. The age of immersive technology is upon us, but its future remains uncertain.

The PlayStation 4 evolved this year. Sony’s flagship console got a little bigger and a little more powerful, though its potential is as yet undertapped. It also got its very own VR headset, though that headset noticeably fails to match its PC counterparts. It’s not clear whether Sony has moved their gaming system in all the right directions, but they’re certainly skipping forward.

When the Oculus Rift VR headset came out earlier this year, it was promising but incomplete. It had this nice, comfy set of virtual reality goggles… but that was all. This week, Oculus finally catches up.

A few hours into Titanfall 2’s unexpectedly fantastic single-player campaign, there’s a mission where everything pivots. The rules change, the story expands, and the game shifts into high gear. That mission is called “Effects and Cause,” and it is really good.

Short version: The new PS4 Pro is a more powerful version of an already good console. We like the PS4 a lot, and the Pro doesn’t do anything to diminish that. However, it’s going to be a while before we know just what that added horsepower will be used for.

It’s the middle of the day, and I’ve spent the last couple of hours trying to figure out how to kill this stupid cameraman. You’d think it would be easy, but I have to make it look like an accident and I can’t harm the newswoman he’s working with. Much harder than it sounds.

There have always been at least two Destinys. There’s the Destiny that most people play, where you fly around the galaxy with your friends, blowing up aliens and carefully managing your vault space. Then there’s competitive Destiny, where players go headshot-to-headshot to see who’s deadliest.

Before The Hunger Games, before Battle Royale, there was another movie based on a book about a dystopian future where an evil government distracts the masses with a popular series of gladiatorial deathmatches. Runners, are you ready for… The Running Man?

House of the Dying Sun rushes ahead with furious focus and great urgency, and it’s hard not to get caught up in its dark current. It sweeps aside the space-opera trappings of modern sci-fi in favor of something more resolute and grim: You’re the bad guy. There are the good guys. Go make an example out of them.

Here’s a nightmare I’ve actually had: I’m a soldier in a war, and no one’s told me what to do. Bullets are whizzing overhead and death could arrive at any moment. Everyone around me seems to know what they’re doing, but not me. I shouldn’t be here. I’m just some guy. I sit there, paralyzed, waiting to die.

For years, I only played PC games with a mouse and keyboard. For years after that, I played almost entirely with a controller. Now I’m back with the mouse and keyboard, and it’s been an illuminating homecoming.

Let’s cut to the chase: PlayStation VR should be better. At its best, Sony’s new virtual reality headset manages to conjure the astonishing, immersive wonder of modern virtual reality. Just as often it is frustratingly held back by outdated hardware that can’t quite do what’s being asked of it.

When people talk about the current golden age of TV, they’re usually referring to big, serious dramas like Breaking Bad or The Wire. I am here today to tell you that Avatar: The Last Airbender, an animated show about a group of magical kids who ride around on a flying buffalo, deserves to be counted among them.

A brief history for those who are new to Kotaku and our on-again, off-again obsession with this game. Destiny is a first-person action game in which players fly around the solar system fighting with aliens, evil cyborgs, and occasionally each other. Collectively, our staff has played over 2,000 hours.

Everyone remembers the first time they played a really good video game. The constant surprises of Half-Life, or the drama of Final Fantasy VI, or the stress and catharsis of Far Cry 2. As good as those games were the first time around, they’d almost certainly be better the second. Or the third. Or the fourth.

A few days ago, I accidentally deleted a batch of saved games. Collectively they represented a couple hundred hours’ worth of time spent playing a dozen or more games. Years of hard-won progress, gone in the blink of an eye.

My lengthy first tour of No Man’s Sky was a disappointment. I spent 30 hours skating across the surface of an endless puddle, searching for depths that didn’t exist. I skipped and skimmed until, with great regret, I stopped.